Herland

and forth never resting on one side. When you compare the 21st century to some of the dystopias that are written it would make it seem that is a utopia especially when compared to Harrison Bergeron. But it also goes the other way, when compared to “Herland” its slacking as a utopia. 21st century American can be seen as a dystopia society for many reasons. Most reason depend how your point of view. The government controls most things but they give you…

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the many staunch champions of feminism who expressed her thoughts on the subject through her widely appraised literary works. Gilman not only represented the struggles that women of her time were facing through these works, but her real life experiences also exemplify the obstacles that women had to face in order to get to the extent of equality that exists today. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born on July 3, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut to Mary Westcott and…

I would write a story about a society without punishment. The narrator would find himself in an alternate world in which punitive measures are not used to respond to deviant and criminal activities. In fact, in this imaginary world, punitive responses would not even be considered as a response to social problems. Prisons, for example, would not exist in this society, and neither would criminal courts, detention centers, or any instantiation of a retributive model of justice. The absence of…

In the nineteenth century, women's lives were shaped by the cult of true womanhood and domesticity, having to maintain the domestic sphere as pious, pure, domestic, and submissive to their husbands. During that time, the images of self available to women must only reflect and sustain patriarchal ideology (King and Morris 23). Women who adhered to such qualities were promised true happiness and power. The cult asserted that women retained the womanly virtues that home was thought to be the only…

The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story that deals with the oppression of women during the 19th century. Back then, in earlier times, women were treated poorly and were not given much attention. Anything that a woman said was taken for granted. They had the stereotypical roles of "mothers of children" and "wives of the house". Basically women had no freedom of speech, and although they were as knowledgeable and creative as men, all of that was overlooked…

dramas, roughly 675 fictional works, and over 2,000 works of nonfiction” in her lifetime (xii). Because of her abundance of literary work, Gilman was “hailed as the brains of the woman’s movement” of her time (202). The most notable of her works are Herland, Women and Economics, and The Yellow Wallpaper. Women and Economics is notable, because it promoted economic independence for women. The…

Ed. J. A. Weinstock. New York: Lang, 2003. 67-75. Print. | _____. "The Yellow Wall-Paper." The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 3-19. Print. | Knittel, Jana. "Environmental History and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'Herland.'" International Review of Science Fiction 35.96 (Spring 2006): 49-67. Print. | Stratton, Susan. "Intersubjectivity and Difference in Feminist Ecotopias." FEMSPEC 3.1 (2001): 33-43. Print. | [Author Affiliation] | -HEIDI SCOTT, University…

Contemporary feminist utopian writing can better translate the rising consciousness of women writers who try to establish a critical distance from the traditional static feminist utopias such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. Critical utopia is self-critical rather than self-contradictory as it functions as a counter discourse as it puts emphasis on “heterogeneity instead of emphasis on homogeneity, conformity and uniformity” (Tatiana Teslenko 3). It rebels against closure…

The Yellow Wall-Paper and Women’s Rights When I first started reading the short story the “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I did not know what to expect. The story was written by Gilman, who suffered from a mental disorder. It starts off talking about a woman and her husband staying in a colonial mansion for the summer. Is this a love story about a couple spending a romantic summer in a colonial mansion? Then she mentions a haunted house and I thought, could this be a…

Gender The thing about gender is this, it does not matter if someone is male or female; life will kill everyone and mistreat us all. Bit over the top? Not even in the slightest. Dreams are only dreams, reality is far from a dream and very close to a nightmare. Gender is just a distraction, actually focusing on gender is the issue. Men and women are both human, who cares if women have more emotions and men are viewed as being burlier, at the end of the day it takes both men and women to survive…